Moreover,

I keep having visions, more like fantasies, of my graduate thesis. My latest idea is to trace the 1960s EST Trainings through to current white-collar corporate culture. There will even be some philosophical context for EST, with America's unique history of Manifest Destiny, self-reliance, and narcissism.

I'm reading this book called Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream by Barbara Ehrenreich. She decides to do an investigative journalistic piece on what it takes for an unemployed member of the "white-collar class" to find a job. Which, you know, kinda resonated with me in my current situation. Her book only marginally succeeds, since she purports to be compassionate but rather uses her research to mock and belittle all of the people she encounters in the corporate world. It's shoddy work; if she wanted to write a comedy, she should have said so. She leaves out a resolution to her main thesis, which is to uncover the reasons why so many "white-collar" employees are 1) unemployed or 2) dissatisfied with their current lives.

I think she was on to something with her mockery of the barrage of self-help avenues for unemployed people, most of which utilize the power of positive thinking or other law of attraction techniques. For example, most of the concerns of the unemployed are disregarded as external factors that only need to be resolved internally.

The problem with Ehrenreich's analysis is that mockery gets us nowhere. We understand Eherenreich's opinion, but not the underlying factors surrounding white-collar unemployment and despair. I sense a link between the myth of self-help in the corporate world, and the unyielding reality of white-collar America.

Which, would be my thesis. Admit me to grad school, now!!!